Tales from the science classroom

Yesterday was Science Bowl. This is a competition where students answer all kinds of questions about science. All kinds of science. Science I don't know. I wanted to do this with the kids, but I tend to drag my feet. I didn't start practices until after fall break. There were many days I missed. We did not take advantage of Fridays for extra practice. There were a lot of mistakes made. But we went anyway and they did not do too poorly. There were 32 teams and there were split up into 8 divisions. Each division was 4 teams and they played round robin. The top 2 teams from each division moved on to the championships. My kids came in 3rd in their division. Not too shabby. I was proud of them. Much of their problem was the lack of confidence. But that we can work on. This gave me a number of ideas for next year. I want to use these students to recruit more students to participate. I want to start practice as soon as we get back to school. I will treat it like a team and make th...

I seriously am drowning in files. Some are paper - lots are paper - but even more are electronic. I thought I'd organize things by class so I have chemistry, AP chemistry, AP biology, etc. folders in Google Drive, my portable drive, Google drive at work, on each of my computers, and god knows where else. So when I'm looking for something, I know exactly where to look. All 6 places. This has got to change. I tried to keep things on my portable drive, but then I stopped bringing it to school. Perfect. So I store things in a couple of places and then forget where it is or what it's called. Ugh!!! I'm tired of this. Really, incredibly, truly tired. It is time to come up with a plan and freaking stick to it. I think my best bet is Chalk.com. That is the lesson planner I use and it seems to make the most sense to store the things I use or will use there. But the problem arises when I come across something that I might want to use in the future. Where do I put that? The m...